


Common Blood

by 1001cranes



Series: Teen Wolf Repo! Series [1]
Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Blood, Bloodplay, Drug Use, F/M, Gore, Gunplay, Guns, Knifeplay, Light BDSM, M/M, Mild Gore, Mild Kink, Mild S&M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, Rape/Non-con References, Recreational Drug Use, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 22:19:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a post-apocalyptic world, the Argents have emerged as a the savior of mankind, using their medical conglomerate, GeneCo, to provide organ transplants - for a hefty price. Sometimes they help the Bioconservative unfortunates like Erica Reyes, an epileptic with a gift for dance; and sometimes they use Repomen like Derek Hale to hunt down clients who default on their payments, and repossess their organs.</p><p>  <i><b>GeneCo</b> - In the business of expanding life, not ending it.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. and pluck out thine eye

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the incredible video by darth_begbie, available [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwPwhUEb-bk). I would never have been able to write this without it.
> 
> If you haven't seen Repo! the Genetic Opera, worry not! I have been assured the concept is fairly well explained through out the story. If you're very worried, the paragraph description from Wikipedia explains it nicely:
> 
> _An epidemic of organ failures devastated the planet in the future. The mega-corporation GeneCo emerged as a savior. GeneCo provides organ transplants, in addition to cosmetic surgeries. GeneCo is legally able to repossess defaulted organs. Clients who default on payments will be hunted down by Repomen; skilled assassins contracted by GeneCo to recover defaulted property by any means necessary._  
>  sounds familiar, no?
> 
> For those who have seen Repo!, also do not worry - though I have taken the overall world of Repo! to play around in, the plot and dialogue of the movie is not my plot or dialogue: don't worry that you might have more fun watching the movie. I mean, you might, it's an awesome movie, but I've definitely tried to bring a new story to the table with our beloved Teen Wolf characters. 
> 
> Warnings and disclaimer: The subject matter necessitates some gore and graphic violence; watching the video for the fic or having seen the original Repo! movie will give you a fairly good idea. There is futuristic drug use, with needles and/or a gun-like apparatus. Sex is implicitly traded for drugs. There is mild bloodplay, and other mild BDSM aspects including bondage, most of which has not been thoroughly discussed in advance. There is nothing actually non-con, but definitely light to middling shades of dub-con, including relationships between people with differing levels of power (workplace superior and underling, dealer and junkie) and age, from ~5 years (Jackson/Derek) to ~20 (Peter/Stiles), though everyone in the fic is adult/legal. There is some discussion of rape, and a very brief rape fantasy.
> 
> As I have no idea what kind of epilepsy Erica suffered from before her transformation, I used one potential cure for one possible cause of one type of epilepsy. Some of the other medical stuff is obviously very handwaved, keeping in mind that Repo! is the world of the future. In keeping with this, there are no STD/STIs, because YOLO.
> 
> ‘The Narrows’ is lovingly borrowed from Gotham City canon; Genists and Biocons are my own terms, with Biocons standing for BioConservatives.
> 
> Finally, this ‘fic’ is a loosely arranged set of stories in the Repo! Universe. I would (obviously) recommend reading all of them, preferably in the current order. However, if a particular pairing isn’t your cup of tea, feel free to skip that story. Certain events might be only briefly mentioned or eclipsed entirely based on the story, but are hopefully still understandable in all stories. There are a Scott/Isaac story and a Allison + Lydia/Chris story in the works; there is a small preview of each attached at the end.
> 
> Thank you to Marianna and to Nrem for betaing as well as listening to me freak out. Thanks (and apologies) goes to everyone on twitter for the same reason.

"Let me be frank, Miss Reyes - or Erica, can I call you Erica? Erica, you're one of the most talented dancers I've ever seen. I say that with envy and complete honesty. I'm not here to bullshit you about your worth. I think we both know how much you're worth in your current condition. I'm here to help."

"Help?" Erica says coolly, because so far the only thing anyone has done is step around the elephant in the room. "How exactly would you help me?"

When Kate Argent smiles, she displays just enough of her teeth to show she means business. To let out some of that luminous GeneCo glow. "We'll make you beautiful, sweetheart. We'll fix your skin and your hair. We'll tuck in your waist and perk up your breasts. We'll permanently boost your red blood cell number. We'll even fix those defective sodium channels and make your epilepsy a thing of the past. I called you one of the most talented dancers I've ever seen. That's now. When we're done with you, you'll be the most talented dancer the _world_ has ever seen. You'll be the star of GeneCo's dance troupe and you'll dance sold out shows every night. Everyone will want to be you or fuck you or both, and all you have to do is sign on the dotted line." Kate slides the contract across the table. Crisp from the printers. Warm enough under her hand that if the paper weren’t so expensive she’d be worried about drawing back inked fingers. "We need you. And if you ever want better than teaching snot-nosed brats how to plié, you need us too."

In the end, Erica nearly grabs the pen out of Kate’s hand, but there’s never been a person so far who hasn’t. And they never do read the fine print, Kate thinks, but that’s fine with her.

| |

In truth, the fine print doesn’t matter to Erica. In its own way neither does the spotlight, the bright lights and shining prizes Kate promises her. Erica just wants to dance - wants to spin and never be dizzy again. Wants to never spend another agonizing minute convulsing on the ground. Would jump at the chance to live without fear that her next fall is her last - a brain bleed, a fracture that she might never really heal from. Hospital bills high enough that trying to pre-peddle her organs seems like an option. She’s seen it all, in the Narrows. The things desperate people will do. Erica is tired of being desperate. Tired of being sick. Tired of being tired. 

Of course there are strings attached. Of course it won’t be perfect. They’ll own her. Six performances a week until she drops dead from it, surgical joints and bioengineered bones, a designer heart pumping even after the rest of her knows better. Or worse, because Erica knows the history of those who came before her - people like Blind Mag. Like Greek tragedies, she thinks, or at least what she remembers of them. Everyone always paying for their fate; if Erica signs on the dotted line, at least she’ll know the price.

| |

When Boyd is assigned to be one of Erica’s bodyguards, he doesn’t expect to like her. He thinks he knows who she is already. He knows about the deal she signed with GeneCo. It’s exactly the kind of rags to riches story the world loves to hear: Girl Plucked from the Narrows, Made Better, Does Better. Boyd’s already seen it before a dozen times.

As far as Boyd has seen, there are two kinds of brats in the world - the kind born into money, the kind whose parents grew them in vats just the way they wanted them to be, who get upgrades for their birthdays and Christmas and over the summer holiday, just before they take the family jet to Russia and indulge in some of the last fresh air and uncontaminated sunlight this planet has to offer. They at least have the excuse of ignorance, as much of an excuse as that is. They’ve never had to want for anything, much less worry about where their next meal was going to come from, or if it was going to make them sick. The Genists don’t ever worry about that. No genetic diseases. Boosted immune systems, faster healing, increased red blood cell count. Even higher pain tolerance.

The others are like Erica. The Biocons. The ones GeneCo plucks from obscurity, or who win the yearly jackpot. GeneCo even gives out scholarships, sometimes, for the promotion. People lap it up the way dogs eat shit. People like Erica – they’re supposed to know better. They’ve seen what it’s like Below. They lived it. They know what it’s like to be hand to mouth every day of your life. They know exactly how much a new liver costs, how much to fix a birth defect, how much it costs to raise a child to schooling standards. Boyd’s parents had been lucky enough to have been from a rich family, before the Replications. It wasn’t much, all these years later, but it had been enough to get him in shape and send him to school. He’d been good with math, with logic, at seeing how things fit together, and no one had been particularly surprised when the Argents came looking for him. He took the money and their promises, because he didn't want what would come after turning those down. Boyd is good with a gun, good with his hands, and great with a scalpel. It surprises people. Boyd has brute force, sure, but he knows the placement of every tendon in your body, and how to slice and watch you sprawl.

Girls like Erica party hard and die young. They get addicted to surgery, they get addicted to Z. There’s a point where GeneCo doesn’t get a return on what it’s putting in, where pulling the plug and finding some other fresh young thing ends up being cheaper. Boyd used to get attached in the beginning. Friendly. But he knows there's no point now. The unlucky ones die, and the lucky ones get stripped of their upgrades and returned to the Narrows. Or maybe the other way around. 

| |

The thing is - Erica’s not exactly what Boyd was expecting. Her file is thick with medical transcripts, thin on anything else, and once he sees her, Boyd tries to fill the rest of the blanks in himself.

Erica is seventeen years old, five-seven in flats but prone to wearing heels that push her to six. Her blood type is O-positive. Hair dyed a perfect shade of Honey Blonde, Patented GeneCo Color LB355. Minor cosmetic surgery. The overall package turns out very pretty, even for GeneCo work, and no one is particularly surprised when she turns out to be more popular than Blind Mag ever was. She moves like a dancer; graceful, but with purpose, which Boyd admittedly admires. Makes it easier to find her in a crowd. She’s less condescending than Kate, friendlier than Chris, and a damn sight less likely to fly off the handle than Gerard. All in all, not nearly the worst of Boyd’s charges. 

He has some of it right. She likes the clothes the Argents send over in bucketloads. She likes the parties - which is good on both counts, because the talent has to be out and about and seen to make any impression - and she’s like a kid in a candy store the first time she tries anything. She wants it all, she wants it now, she wants it for her own. But she doesn’t do drugs; not that he’s noticed, and Boyd’s job is to notice. She hasn’t used since her last dose of Zydrate, right after her final surgery. She might drink, she might take a designer pill or two - almost old-fashioned, these days - but he’s never had to hold her hair back while she vomits, and there are no tiny Zydrate guns lying around her dressing room. 

She likes to eat.

That sounds stupid, almost. A lot of people like to eat. Particularly some of the Genists, the ones who make it into a show. Who have to eat rarer and rarer, stranger and stranger - soft-boiled eggs in pine nut sauce, ostrich ragout, fried veal escalope with raisins, saffron chickpeas - pigs rearranged to look like peacocks; geese stuffed with caraway and parsnips, re-feathered after they’re been cooked. It’s just another way to spend money. Another way to indulge. 

Erica likes fruit. She asks for apples in her dressing room the way others might demand flowers - or drugs, or prostitutes. Boyd isn’t surprised by much of anything anymore. Except for those damn apples.

Boyd remembers what fruit was like down in the Narrows. Wizened, wrinkled. He’d eaten oranges that had practically turned to dust in his mouth, but there was something in them still. Boyd's mother had called them liquid sunshine, but that didn't mean much to Boyd when he’d never seen the sun.

Still. Erica had the bigger things, the biggest things money could buy, and somehow - she still hadn’t forgotten those small things. She could have had truffles and caviar at every meal, and it was apples instead.

Looking back, he thinks that might be when he started to fall in love with her.

| |

It takes Erica longer to fall in love with Boyd. She’s too in love with everything else first. 

It’s difficult not to be - the clothes, the jewelry, the makeup. Her reflection in the mirror. It isn’t even that she’s beautiful, exactly. She knows the beauty is fake, that anyone can buy it if they have enough money. But it’s her name in the headlines, on the marquee, her face on the posters plastered around the city, and that’s only hers, in the end. GeneCo can manufacture any type of beauty they wish - make a body stronger, taller, skinnier, even quicker, but they can’t teach it to dance. They can’t make another Erica Reyes, and she damn well knows it.

It makes the crowd’s adoration easy to swallow at first - easier than silent, taciturn bodyguards with knowing eyes - but soon enough the adoration is suffocating, the hands too free, and the minutes never her own, much less the hours or days. She doesn’t want anyone’s love then. Starts to like Boyd just for his mildly removed disdain. Better than Matt’s abject flattery, better than Greenberg’s flustered comments and darting eyes. Boyd probably thinks she’s stupid, foolish, empty-headed. Pretty as a picture and just as dumb. 

She tacks a copy of her contract up on her dressing room wall, and starts to think he might not be wrong.

| |

She’s a beautiful dancer.

On some level, Boyd knew that had to be true. That’s the point, isn’t it - why the Argents wanted her in the first place. Any decent surgeon can make someone beautiful. Nearly any body can be made strong. Parts replaced, upgraded, reshaped. But Erica, for all her improvements, for all the surgeries, moves beyond that. 

Erica is transcendent. Boyd’s not the type to gush, so - trust him. Transcendent. Capable of leaving the world behind and taking you with her. When she dances, Boyd forgets he’s watching. He forgets his job, frankly, and nothing makes him do that. 

Her Sugarplum Fairy is queenly - her Phrygia is formidable, and joyous - but she does her best when the work is transformative. She excels at Giselle, at sliding from beautiful to broken-hearted to benevolent. Her performance of Swan Lake nearly brings the house down. She personifies both Odette and Odile - not because she plays them as dualities, Boyd thinks, not like two sides of the same coin that never really exist at the same time, the obverse of each; but because she plays them as twin parts of herself. 

| |

It starts to go south about six months in. Boyd isn’t sure why. Kate doesn’t tell him anything, unless it’s to drop the snidest of hints, and Boyd doesn’t particularly like either of Erica’s other bodyguards. Well, no. Not entirely true - Daehler is a creep, yes, but Greenberg is competent enough. Greenberg would tell Boyd if there was a problem: if Erica was using, if someone had tried to attack her, if she had been summoned to one GeneCo party or another, but he’d never notice if she felt depressed, or if she hated her newest upgrade, or if some stupid Genist had broken her heart. Boyd sees more than other people. It’s not a requirement of the job, precisely, but there’s a reason he’s lasted so long and taken on so much of the Argents’ loyalty. 

Erica doesn’t dance well, that night. Scratch that - she dances well, she always dances _well_ , but the same way any trained dancer would. Not spectacular. Not Erica. 

“You okay?” he asks. 

Erica nods. “Fine.” She tilts her head. Watches her reflection in the mirror. “Absolutely fine.”

Whatever the hell she is, it’s the opposite of fine. 

There was a private show, earlier. It’s marked on her schedule, and Boyd frowns down at it. The little blocked off square. 

Prostitution is illegal, though to say it goes rampantly unchecked wouldn’t be wrong. Sex for Zydrate, sex for back-alley surgery. Kate has been known to extend a line of credit for a date or two, if the target was young and attractive enough. Erica’s contract dictates only that she dance when and where the Argents demand. It can be an audience of a thousand, or an audience of one, if the one they need to persuade is powerful enough. Boyd hates to think of what that audience of one might be.

So Boyd makes a decision. One he might yet regret, but he thinks he might hate the alternative more. 

“Here,” he says, and pulls one of the scalpels out of his belt. They’re practically fashion accessories, these days - last year it was surgical masks; before that staple jewelry. When Boyd was younger, neon stitches were in style.

“What are you doing?” Erica asks, and the fact that she isn’t scared at all that Boyd is coming towards her with a scalpel in his hands - he’s caught between feeling happy and wondering if she shouldn’t be more careful. Any Repoman coming towards her is a threat.

“I’m going to teach you how to kill a man,” he says, and once Erica sees he’s serious, she gives him her brightest, realest smile. 

| |

She has beautiful hands, Erica. A little large for a girl maybe, but as well knit together as the rest of her, as graceful. She wields the scalpel like a pro. 

She would be good at it, he thinks - being a Repoman. Boyd never had a taste for the anatomical stuff; it’s why he’s a bodyguard instead of, well, _other_. He doesn’t have the delicacy for it, or the stomach. He’s all right with that. 

| |

The first time Erica kisses Boyd is in the rain, on the back of his motorcycle. Like a scene from a movie. She’s late to a party, she’s soaking wet, her hair is frizzing - even genetics can’t solve that, as it turns out - her makeup is running, and in trying to outfox the paparazzo they’ve gotten turned around. In the wrong side of the city at the wrong time of the night, and it doesn’t even matter, with her arms wrapped around a Repoman. 

“Fuck the party,” she says, and laughs. “Take me home!” It isn’t the first time Boyd’s been inside her apartment - he’s her bodyguard, he’s probably spent more time - but it’s the first time she’s dragged him to her bed. Not the first time she’s kissed him, but the first time it’s been with intent - not a stolen, sweet thing, but a mean one, a heady one, fraught with meaning. 

| |

Boyd falls in love in bits and pieces. It’s the fruit. It’s the dancing. It’s the turn of her ankles and the way she wields a scalpel. Her beautiful everything. It’s because when Erica decides on something, it gets done. Whole heartedly. No regrets, no holdbacks. She throws herself into everything, headfirst, foolish, as if there are no consequences - dances, laughs, eats, cries - but its never as grasping as the others he sees, never racing to beat a clock they built in the first place. It’s something different. She doesn’t look at Boyd like there’s a finite number of experiences to be found in his hands, his mouth, his cock. He’s more than the sum of his parts, and so is she. Even if some of those parts have a price tag.

| |

She loves Boyd. She loves him. Not the same way she has been infatuated before. She’s had her crushes. Childhood pashes, desperate teenage wants. There were boys before him - one in the Narrows, when she was growing up, and plenty here. She doesn’t feel bad about that. Before she was ‘that Reyes girl’, the freak, the epileptic, the ultimate genetic loser. Who could blame her, really, for gorging herself on all the things so long denied her? She finds that sex can be a lot like dancing, done right. Passionate, or practiced - both, if you’re lucky. A give and take - emphasis on the give or emphasis on the take, she’s finding, and oh, Erica likes to take - a rise and swell, a crescendo, small beautiful movements or large passionate ones. It’s fun, it’s sweaty; she feels sore and accomplished in the end. Really, what isn’t there to like? Why shouldn’t there be boys? She likes the way they look at her, the things they buy her. The people she used to see in the tabloids. Give a person the chance to live out their fantasy, and they will. 

But Boyd - oh, she loves Boyd. She was scared of him, at first. She was scared of all Repomen - GeneCo’s spectral hunters. They were the bogeymen of the Narrows, the stuff of nightmares. The glassy opaque face-guards, the black rubber gloves. Big leather boots. Kits of knives and scalpels, pliers, saws. Killers. But Boyd’s not a killer, Erica has realized. Not by nature. He’d kill to protect her, kill to keep her safe, and that’s - Erica doesn’t know that she _loves_ that, that she’d like to see it, but knowing he would - knowing he’s taught her to do the same - warms something inside her.

Maybe that’s weird, she thinks. Maybe she has a really flawed definition of what love is. Doesn’t make it any less real, though. Doesn’t make it any less _love_.

| |

Boyd isn’t naive enough to think they’re getting away with anything. The Argents have eyes in too many places, their fingers on too many pulse points. If Erica were sleeping with anyone _but_ Boyd, he’d be reporting it himself. As it is, he doesn’t hold anything else back. They don’t need another reason to doubt him.

Boyd doesn’t expect it to end well. He knows it won’t. He can’t even think of what ‘ending well’ would look like. What are the options, for people like him? Taking a bullet for one of the Argents? Going until his body gives out? Until he’s too slow, too weak, paying for the upgrades to keep a job to pay for the upgrades? GeneCo pays well, but Boyd’s grandma needed her arthritis taken care of last year; his sister was born with a heart defect. Unlike the Genists, Boyd has no desire to live forever, but as long as he can stand it, he and his are going to live _well_. 

How could it ever end for Erica? She dances, she smiles, she sells tickets and shills GeneCo when they say she should. It doesn’t even look fake, most of the time. But Boyd is old enough to remember Blind Mag - watching her pluck out her own eyes on live broadcast. He doesn’t know what’s happened to most of the others. Isn’t that bad enough, that he doesn’t _know_? 

| |

One night the call comes in for a clean-up crew in Erica’s dressing room at the theater. Boyd’s never moved so quickly in his life. Shoves his radio at Greenberg and runs for his motorbike.

When he gets there, the body on the floor isn’t Erica. She’s sitting in front of her vanity in her dressing room. Blood on her dress. It’s stark and startlingly fresh against the white silk slip of her dress. Boyd’s heart nearly jumps out of his chest, in that moment, but it’s easy enough to see it isn’t hers. 

“What happened?” he asks, and when she lifts her head to look at him, meeting his eyes in the mirror, something… isn’t quite there. Her eyes are as wide as the little cartoon animals that play on the vidscreens. Inhuman, though that hadn’t stopped some of the Genists for asking their surgeons for them, of course. 

“Did you want to change?” he asks. Pitches his voice lower. Not soothing, exactly, but calm. “I’m sure the stage manager -”

“This is fine,” she says. “Just - fine,” like she’s coming to some sort of decision. She pulls out a red lipstick - bright red, blood red - and paints it on. Like a slash. A gaping wound. “The gala’s tonight,” she continues. Presses her lips together. Makes the little pop noise all woman do. “I need to go.”

Boyd can’t actually argue with that. “The Argents will be there.”

“Of course they are,” she says softly. “Of course I’ll go,” because she gets it. Erica isn’t stupid. There’s a contract with her name on it – a contract that will give her everything and anything a girl could ask for, as long as she dances when they say dance, each and every time.

It’s no way to live. Nobody realizes before they sign, and few even realize after. Even when they’re unhappy in their gilded cages, they rarely blame the cage. They think it’s them - there’s always another deficiency, another flaw, another gory, gaping hole to be filled with surgery or drugs or sex. Boyd wishes he could have told her that before all this, that the beauty and the ugliness coincide here, one always tainting the other. Beauty might have been found few and in-between, in the Narrows, but at least when it happened it was a pure flash of it. It was real. 

Erica knows now. She knows there’s no going back. 

“We’ll take the Ducati,” Boyd offers, and Erica meets his eyes in the mirror. Showing up on a Repoman’s motorcycle will only titillate the crowd – which the Argents will approve of – and there’s a chance it will make Erica smile.

| |

By the time Boyd drives Erica home for the night the blood is dried, dark and crusted, the dress ruined. Neither of these things matter. The blood is titillating to the crowds. Always has been. Maybe Erica will start a new trend - blood splatter might just complement the current surgical cuts - and GeneCo’s star can’t be expected to wear the same outfit twice anyway. 

“Stay,” she says, “please,” and Boyd calls his location in to Daehler. Clicks off before he can hear whatever crude remark he comes up with this time. 

“I thought it would be difficult,” she says later, quietly. Against the side of his neck. Against the pulse of his jugular. “The killing, I mean. Or at least… I thought I’d hesitate, maybe.”

Killing’s easier than you think, Boyd wants to explain. Which is simple to say but difficult to accept. 

| |

It changes Erica. More than it changed Boyd. It hurt him, in a way: made him sick in the short-term, made him drink, gave him headaches. Gave him nightmares. Made him stare at his hands own hands as though they’d betrayed him, as though they belonged more to the Argents’ than him. The difference, maybe, is that Boyd always expected it would happen, sometime or another. It was always Boyd’s job. Not Erica’s.

She becomes pale. Restless. Pared down. She’s always practiced often, ready to perform on demand, but now she dances all the time. She dances like a thing possessed. It makes her ragged around the edges - not any less beautiful, somehow. Maybe more so. Her eyes are brighter, but it’s like a fever. It won’t last.

“I love you,” Boyd tells her. Tries to keep the desperation from his voice. “I love you, Erica.”

She says it back, usually. Strokes the lines of his face, the corners of his eyes. Like she’s trying to see into them. Behind them. As if checking to what he’s saying is real. 

| |

He is. She loves him too. She knows it, knows it in the marrow of her bones - that’s still hers, after all. That she intends to keep.

| |

One morning, Boyd can’t get ahold of her. It doesn’t strike him as unusual at the time - she likes to sleep in, when she gets the chance. Likes to go out for brunch and shopping. She has a thing for jackets that Boyd doesn’t entirely understand, to be frank, and he’s spent enough time hauling around Kate Argent’s shopping bags to want to do it in his spare time. 

He’s standing behind the Argents, half-listening, when Chris drops the bomb. 

“- Not the mention GeneCo needs a new star,” he says, off-hand, and Boyd’s pulse _hammers_. He must make a noise, some kind or another, because Kate laughs. 

“Oh sweetie,” Kate says. Cloying and saccharine. “Didn’t anyone _tell_ you? Your little girlfriend defaulted on her contract. We’ve already recollected. Can’t let someone so high profile get away with ripping off GeneCo, now can we?”

Boyd doesn’t remember exactly what happens next - like a rage blackout, but without the rage. Without anything. He remembers nodding, jerkily, like a puppet tied to short-strings. Backing out of Gerard’s office, maybe. And after that nothing, until he’s in her apartment. 

| |

Really, it doesn’t surprise Boyd that the Argents had Erica killed. The upgrades they gave her weren’t just superficial. It wasn’t just a matter of acne scars, of pulling out implants and sewing her back up. There was too much money. There was too much pride. The Argents aren’t forgiving people. They wouldn’t let her go on principle alone.

Was it Greenberg, he wonders, or Danny, or Matt, or Derek, or any of the dozen other Repomen he knows by name. Did Kate do it herself, for the fun of it? Boyd wouldn’t put it past her. The smirk on her face when she told him makes his blood boil, makes his head spin, makes his fingers _twitch_ for the scalpel tucked away at his side.

When the Graverobber poisons her, when Kate starts convulsing on the floor, Boyd takes more than a little pleasure in watching. 

| |

Boyd sounds the alarm like a good Repoman would. Escorts Peter out under the guise of covering GeneCo’s ass - it wouldn’t do to have a drug dealer on the premises when Kate Argent is declared dead, would it? He answers Gerard’s questions, Chris’s cross-examination - he doesn’t even really have to lie. Yes, Kate was using Z. Yes, she had him bring her dealer here. Yes, it was the same dealer. Yes, he’s gone. Yes, she’s dead.

She’s dead.

| |

It’s not that life has no meaning without Erica. Boyd isn’t prone to melodramatics, and he has more than most - his gran, his parents, his little sister. He has them to think of in the moments he can’t think of himself. Gerard Argent’s sudden death, Allison Argent’s miracle cure and ascendance to the head of the company - it makes no difference to Boyd in the day-to-day. The world keeps spinning. 

Until a knock on his door one night. 

Boyd doesn’t live in the best neighborhood. He can handle himself. He doesn’t need to shell out half of his hard-earned money for neighbors that’ll turn up his nose at what he does. If that means throwing the occasional addict looking for Z out of the building, well, all in a day’s work. 

“You won’t find what you’re looking for here,” he says, and then stops dead in his tracks. 

She's hacked off her hair - shade LB355, Boyd's brain tells him, uselessly; darker at the roots, darker shaved too close to her head - but her eyes are still as luminous. 

“Hey,” she says. Somewhere between laughter and tears. “I think I’m exactly in the right place.”

| |

“Where _were_ you?” he asks.

And - “Why did you?”

And - “ _How_ did you?” because the Argents are bloodhounds in their own way; the most vicious kind. 

“Did you forget where I came from?” she laughs, and cradles his hands in hers, clenching so hard the bones creak. “I know plenty of people in low places. Plenty of people who never want to be found. There’s a place for us, in New Shilo. But I need - _we_ need,” she says, “we need new Ident chips.”

Boyd can’t help smiling. Framing her face with his hands. “As it happens, I know a guy."


	2. Designer Heart

It takes Derek nearly an hour to strip the body. Carefully, delicately. Repossession might not seem like the sort of work that demands delicacy, but in the end nicking an organ is as bad as smashing it on pavement. Then a half hour to dispose of the body, another half hour to drop the organs off at GeneCo. Half an hour to get back to his apartment. Another hour to clean his gear properly, beyond the initial hosedown. And that was on top of the days it had taken to track Jason Myers down in the first place. He hadn't looked like much, on the surface, but he’d had friends in all the right places. All the low ones.

He’s too goddamn old for this, Derek thinks sometimes. Too worn out. If there were less anger in him, he’d probably think about giving up. Rolling over. Dying. The anger, itself, is enough.

He’s barely finished heating up week old Chinese when his phone trills at him. The mechanic ding of a new message from GeneCo.

"Hey lover," Kate purrs, and Derek grimaces. "Got a fresh one for you. Pretty. If you want to take your time with him, I'd certainly understand." The hair on the back of Derek's neck stands on end when Kate chuckles. "Chris is sending you the list of parts, and Daddio is pretty keen to collect. If you hurry, there might be a bonus in it for you.”

Kate might make Derek’s skin crawl, but a bonus is nothing to sneeze at.

Another trill. Another message. This time with an attachment - the parts Derek needs to collect. Derek can't help whistling, involuntarily, as he scans the list GeneCo property this kid has in him. Enough to fund a small country. Must have had some line of credit, once upon a time. How the mighty fall.

A rest first, Derek thinks. Four hours. Enough to function on. Derek isn’t the only Repoman the Argents keep within the city limits, but he is the best at what he does.

There are a few kinds of Repomen. The most loyal work as GeneCo guards - Kate would be a fool to think Derek loyal now, and Chris never did; the irony, of course, being that no one would have been more loyal to Kate than Derek in the beginning. But not now. He wouldn’t be one of hers for the world - doing the Argents’ dirty work, guarding their castle, threatening their enemies.

The rest of the Repomen have varying skill sets. There's the finer work; the kind the victims might walk away from. An eye, a kidney - something removable, extractable. Something one of the medical Repomen can take without killing. Good PR for GeneCo, and it never fails to surprise Derek how many customers end up crawling back, even after everything GeneCo has done.

Then there are Repomen like Derek. Rippermen. For the hearts, the brains, the lungs. For when someone has to be scooped clean and disposed of like garbage. An uncommon mix of brutality and precision. The ability to kill and not get lost in it. To value the bloody materials. To slip your hands through a carcass and not lose your lunch; Derek never has. It’s a job skill. It’s a living. Makes Derek’s work less common but more valuable.

“Jackson Whittemore,” Derek says, softly, and sets the phone back down. “Guess you’re mine.”

| |

Jackson Whittemore's last address is a high rise in the center of the city. Already given back to the bank. There were other properties owned by his family - businesses, warehouses, tracts of land in the Narrows. Doubtful that someone like Whittemore had even known about them, really, but worth checking into. Home, then family, then friends. Work, though Derek doubts this particular son of privilege was putting in hours anywhere. He’d be better off checking the target’s favorite club; it wouldn’t be the first time Derek had caught someone putting their GeneCo brand liver to the test.

| |

From the very first, Jackson surprises him. He’s a _runner_.

It never fails to surprise Derek how many people don't run. How many people think that _now_ is the time to argue, to plead for mercy. How many people think that a man clad in black from head to toe, a man with a bag full of saws and scalpels and pliers is going to be more merciful than GeneCo’s accounts department. Running is the smart move, if you find Derek on your doorstep. Running is at least a delay.

Runners even have an advantage, of a sort - Derek’s gear weighs a good forty pounds, and there isn’t much of a point in catching Jackson without it. In subduing him. If Derek hadn’t invested in a few tactical upgrades, Jackson might have broken free. As it is, still a challenge. But Jackson doesn’t know the Narrows. Has probably never been here before. Doesn’t know the cramped, twisting streets, the low-hanging signs and pipes, the places drunks and beggars cluster and trip up your feet. Isn’t used to breathing in air so thick with chemicals it can nearly be seen.

When Derek tackles him, Jackson hits the ground hard enough to bruise, maybe break a bone or two; Derek spares a brief moment to hope that nothing internal ends up pierced, as he pins Jackson to the ground with his not inconsiderable bulk. Jackson still fights. Kicks his legs and twists his arms while Derek scrambles to turn him over, pin him down. At least for long enough to strap him to the table.

Derek has one knee to the joint of Jackons’s hip; his face mashed into the ground, pushed under Derek’s hand. Even then, he doesn’t stop, and Derek’s estimation goes up another few grudging notches. He’s battered, slightly, but there are few good punches Jackson gets in against Derek’s face. It doesn’t do much more than bruise his knuckles, in all honesty, but usually even those who run have given up by now. Repomen look frightening, in their full gear; they’re supposed to. If Derek had a dollar for every time someone voided their bowels during the process, he wouldn’t have to take this fucking job.

Once Jackson scrapes his knuckles raw - once Derek has him pinned, properly, Jackson’s turns into a crier - big fat tears rolling down his face, slicing through the grime on his face. It’s… pretty. Kate’s voice echoes in his head, and Derek is unfortunately reminded of how well, of precisely how well she knows his tastes.

“Please,” he says. Blubbering. Near to full-on sobs. “Please, don’t -” Watching Derek’s face like a hawk, before descending back into anger. “You psycho, you fucking psycho, don’t _do_ this.”

And it hits Derek, suddenly, how hard he is. How turned on. The shortness of his breath is only partly the chase, the flight and the fight. After comes the fuck, Kate used to tell him. Used to be ready for him, the worst kind of opportunist. Jackson won’t know, can’t feel, not through the thick rubberized material, but it doesn’t make Derek feel any better, knowing he’s gone hard over his next victim. He was never that person. Never wanted to be.

"How much do you owe?" Derek asks, abrupt. Jackson's tears don't stop, exactly - not crocodile tears, then, not entirely, but at least partially manufactured. Clever. “How _much_ do you owe?”

"Pretty sure it's on my paperwork." Jackson spits out, and Derek fights the urge to bite him. Where Jackson’s neck meets his shoulder, the corded meat of him.

"You think I'm letting you up to get paperwork?"

Jackson lifts his chin. "Millions. Millions, okay?” and Derek lets his eyes scan down. Millions, in one body. It’s not that he didn’t know, with the Argents offering a bonus, but it never fails to disgust him, how much Genists buy just because they can. “My - my parents died in the bombings at Shilo, and their company went under without them. The money went with it, and GeneCo's coming for anything they can.” Jackson snorts a little. The sound is wet, after sobbing, and he turns his head away from Derek’s gaze. “Everyone is.”

Someone should add Derek to the tippy-top of that list.

Jackson’s a Genist. A pissy, prissy son of privilege. He's a runner, and a fighter, and a crier. A begger. What Derek does next doesn’t make any sense at all, and yet -

“Get up,” Derek says. When Jackson gawps he says it again. Growls it out. Lower, and harder. “Get. Up.”

Jackson stumbles to his feet like some kind of baby animal - freshly born, all legs and stupidity, feckless, indefensible. Derek grabs him by the scruff of the neck and begins to drag him back to the Narrows.

“Don’t make me regret this,” he growls again, and feels Jackson quake under his hand.

| |

Derek doesn’t kid himself into thinking he’s a good person. He’s not in the right line of work, and he’s too good at what he does. There’s something wrong inside of him. Something broken.

Some days he blames Kate. Decided that she got inside him and twisted him up, made him want things no one should want. Other days he thinks it wasn’t her, not really; that he was fucked up long before she same around. And sometimes, very rarely, he thinks it was when Laura died. That she was the last good thing, the last _good_ part about him, and after that, none of it was worth fighting for anymore.

And that’s about as philosophical as Derek gets, really. Because who the fuck cares about where it came from, or why it happened, when the important thing is who he is now. _What_ he is now. Some people call the Repomen monsters, and he’s not sure he disagrees.

| |

Derek’s list of trustworthy people is about one-person long, one-and-a-half on a good day, and Ivonne Morrell is more a trust borne of convenience than anything. What does it say about Derek, really, that he trusts an acquaintance far more than a friend?

 _Beacon Bar_ hangs above the door, blacklights barely visible in the daylight hours. There’s a drunk in the corner. Passed out.

“This is Ms. Morrell,” Derek says. “I don’t suggest you call her anything else,” and he doesn’t need to look over to know Ivonne is doing something frightening. Probably with a knife, though she’d once done something so particularly disturbing with a citrus zester that Laura had begged to be taught.

Derek makes sure he has Jackson’s attention. “If you try to leave,” he says, biting off each word, “I will rip your throat out.”

Jackson opens his mouth to protest.

“With my teeth,” Derek says, hissing it out, every one of them shining razor sharp. A fluke of genetics rather than a whim of one fashion mod or another, but nonetheless quite frightening. Jackson’s mouth twitches shut.

| |

"I need to see one of the Argents," Derek tells the receptionist. He never bothers learning their names. Never knows if they're going to have a different face pinned on the next time he comes in. "Whoever's free."

"Hmm." The receptionist taps away at the screen. Stalling. Whether to make herself feel more important, or to give Kate or Chris the time to compose themselves doesn’t matter to Derek. He always gets it. “Hmm. If you'll take the elevator to the hundred-sixteenth floor. Mr. Argent will see you before his next meeting.”

Mr. Argent could mean Chris or Gerard, though more likely Chris. Gerard didn’t concern himself with the day-to-days. And he couldn’t quite stand that Derek had fucked his darling daughter, where Chris seemed to think that made Derek more of a loose cannon than anything. Crazy attracts crazy, Derek supposes.

When Derek hits the meeting room, Chris and Kate are sitting at the end of the table. Sterling tea service at the end, and a platter of fresh fruit in between them. The fruit aloe probably costs more than most people make in a month.

“Well,” Kate says. “Isn’t this a surprise!” She practically coos, and Derek has to restrain himself from rolling his eyes. “What brings you to our ivory tower?”

“Jackson Whittemore,” Derek says, and Chris looks up from the paperwork.

"Having problems?"

"No."

Kate laughs. "Well, you haven't collected him. I don't know how else you'd define having a problem.”

“I’m not collecting him,” Derek says. He steels himself, and from the corner of his eye watches Kate’s bodyguard do the same. They’ve both seen the type of damage Kate’s temper is likely to result in. Derek’s on his third set of kidneys. “He’s your newest Repo Man.”

“Excuse me?” Kate’s voice has gone deadly soft, and next to her  
Chris is equally still.

“He can pay off his debt like I am,” Derek continues, and allows himself a small, grim smile. "I thought you’d trust my… taste.” And finally, like the nail in the not-so-proverbial coffin - “And since my last partner is dead --”

It’s not a power play, precisely - most of Derek’s ilk work in pairs; the better to capture and subdue, the easier to strip a body. Derek is owed a partner. Owed far more than that.

Derek has Jackson; no one will get him when Ivonne is protecting him. Not in the Narrows; not in their neighborhood. Kate sending someone else to collect him will only waste time and money. It doesn’t matter to Derek either way.

“Sensible,” Chris says after a moment, into the tense silence.

“ _Acceptable_ ,” from Kate, and Chris shoots her a look.

“Derek only has so much more of a debt to pay. We’ll need someone to replace him, when the time comes.” Chris, at least, seems to be under no illusion that Derek will be continuing his work with GeneCo once his debt his paid. He _is_ the sensible one, Chris. Derek might hate the Argents on principle, but Chris is easily the least detestable.

Kate doesn’t look pleased, but she doesn’t look quite as murderous either. Derek will always count that as a win. “And you think this kid has the stones?” she says.

“You doubt my judgment?” Derek asks, flatly, and Kate’s tongue curls just over her front teeth. “You?”

“Hmm. Let me walk you out,” she says, congenially, and Derek tries to ignore the raised hair on the back of his neck. She’s taller than him once she stands - high heels; if Kate couldn’t be stylish while she was doing something, she’d almost rather not do it at all.

“So he was pretty, then,” she continues conversationally. Pressing the button for the ground floor. “I thought he might be. Those _cheekbones_.”

Derek isn’t scared of being in an enclosed space with Kate. He isn’t. That doesn’t make sense. He’s bigger than her. A better fighter; he learned from her, but she didn’t learn from him.

“Because if he's not up to snuff," she continues, and Derek doesn’t think it’s laughter that colors her voice. “I might have to break out my old kit and go for him myself."

| |

Derek collects the kid from Ivonne with a minimum of fuss. Which is good, considering Kate has left him in as foul a mood as ever.

He stops at one of the street vendors to grab them noodles, and he watches Jackson’s face pucker up in confusion. Jackson’s never had food like this - mass produced, pre-packaged. Synthetic.

“Welcome to the Narrows,” Derek says. Fingers biting into Jackson’s shoulder.

| |

Derek rents out a warehouse basement. His sleeping hours are dubious, unscheduled, and he doesn’t like neighbors who even pretend to be friendly. The Argents offered him a place higher up in the city, away from the riffraff and the Z addicts, but the offer had not-so-explicitly involved warming Kate’s bed. Derek would rather live on the street.

It’s not the same building his family used to live in, but it’s the same neighborhood. The same burnt out people, the same crumbling buildings with the blacked out windows and the flickering neon lights. Dead during the day and feverish with activity at night. Not much of a place to live or die, but most people do both in the same block.

“You’ll crash with me,” Derek says. Pushing Jackson down the stairs ahead of him, and pulling his gear behind him. “Unless some of your friends are willing to put you up.”

The way Jackson’s head ducks down to look at his shoes, mutinously, tells Derek everything.

“Five-two-eight-seven-two,” he says, and watches Jackson punch it in with shaking fingers. “Remember it.”

“You live here?” Jackson asks, sneer pulling at his face as Derek steps around him.

On some level, Derek couldn’t have expected any other reaction. His apartment is clean - as clean as a basement is ever going to get, almost constantly cold, chilled - and the decorating is spare. A fridge, a table, a couple of chairs. A couch. A bedroom off to the left. Bathroom. A room full of extra Repo gear past that, and three empty rooms beyond.

Derek makes good money - could stand to put more of it aside for creature comforts, instead of fast tracking his debt payments. But making his punishment more comfortable would go against the point, wouldn’t it? Derek knows luxury. When he was with Kate - suffice to say he’s lost his taste for it.

“I do,” Derek says, and throws the bag of Repo equipment squarely at Jackson’s chest, just to watch him flinch when the breath gets knocked out of him. “And now, so do you.”

“ _I_ —”

“You’re not going to run,” Derek says. He waits for some kind of confirmation from Jackson, and when he doesn’t get it, grabs the back of Jackson’s neck. “I _said_ \- “

“I heard you, okay,” Jackson spits out, and yanks himself away. Out of reach. Makes Derek’s hands itch just to be back on him. “ _Psycho_ ,” Jackson whispers, just loud enough to be heard.

“You probably wouldn’t make it out of the neighborhood anyway,” Derek sneers. “There are three empty rooms. Pick one.” If Jackson wants something even resembling a bed tonight, he’ll go looking.

The door at the end of the hallway is a bathroom, of sorts. Derek had to jerry-rig the shower himself, install a drain and a halfway decent running water source. The water runs hot in bursts, sometimes lukewarm for a few minutes at a time. Derek scrubs shampoo through his hair and tilts his head back to rinse off.

He’s half-hard already, just thinking about Jackson in the other room. Sitting on Derek’s couch, shaking, maybe crying. Of course he’s crying, Derek reminds himself. You came to murder him. He’s lost everything in the past few weeks, and now he’s trapped in an apartment with an assassin.

His dick isn’t particularly interested in these excuses.

“Fuck,” Derek says, defeated, and thinks about the tangle of Jackson under him. What he’d really wanted to do when he tackled Jackson, when he’d been splayed on the pavement, and panting.

All the things he could have done to Jackson, in all honesty, Derek thinks a few minutes later; toweling himself off. Before Derek had killed him. Even after. Not Derek’s taste, but… he’s heard things. They all have. There are no lows to which one Repoman or another hasn’t sunk. The Argents have a lot of power. The Argents do what they want, and their pets are given the same privilege. Derek was fifteen when Kate met him in a club. Slumming. Looking for her new distraction, her new _toy_. Derek had been the latest in a line, though one of the only Kate has kept around. To rub salt in a wound? To keep an enemy closer? He doesn’t know.

Derek gets redressed in the same clothes - he has no one to impress - and heads to the door, he sees Jackson sitting on the sofa. Holding his head in his hands.

“Shower’s open,” Derek says. It comes out jeering, in the silence. “Thought I told you to find a bed,” and Jackson’s eyes are wild, wild.

Then he goes to see Peter.

| |

Peter is, admittedly, one of the larger downsides to Derek’s plan. Derek doesn’t like to see him. Doesn’t like to even to even _think_ about him, if he doesn’t have to, but Derek’s going to need Zydrate. The good stuff, and even if he doesn’t trust Peter, he trusts his drugs.

Derek doesn’t pretend his life isn’t fucked up.

Peter’s place looks the same. The edge of the city. Equidistant from the graveyards and the high-rises, the gleaming city center. The dogs outside the gate look better fed than most people.

“Huginn,” Derek says. Low. Lets them sniff at his hands. “Muninn.” Not anywhere close to ravens, but Peter was always a bit strange. Even before.

Speaking of -

“Derek,” Peter says, leaning against the doorframe, and Derek isn’t sure how to take that Peter sounds pleased.

“Uncle.” It never hurts to play to Peter’s sentimental side, in the beginning. Even if Derek doesn’t feel any of it.

“Have to say. I’m surprised to see you in my neck of the woods. Pups, tsk-tsk,” he clicks, and gestures the dogs back to the gate. They slink there, quietly, and Derek follows Peter inside.

His boy is nowhere to be found, which makes Derek breathe a little easier.  
When he’s sober, his eyes dart over everything, drinking it in. Touching everything. But when he’s high, it’s worse. He’s cutting, and cruel, but he lies there, mostly. Lets Peter pet him like a cat.

"I need some Z."

Peter’s eyebrows raise in what might be genuine surprise. They both know Zydrate has never been Derek’s vice. “For my favorite nephew? Of course." When he reaches out to touch the scars on Derek’s forearms, Derek grabs Peter's wrists. Tightens his fingers to the threshold of bruises. The easy affection, the sentiment - all gone.

"The good stuff. I don't need my new partner sick off your month-old corpse swill."

“My. Aren’t we touchy,” Peter says, and smiles. Flexes against the grip Derek has around his wrists. “New partner? Try not to get this one killed, Derek. One might be a mistake, but two seems like carelessness."

Peter’s cutting remarks are more familiar territory than his congeniality, these days.

Derek lets go of Peter. Shrugs. Not quite nonchalantly, but a decent attempt. Good enough to fool anyone who wasn’t Peter. "It's a dangerous world out there. Or haven’t you heard.”

“I’m usually doing the telling,” Peter says - somewhat ghoulishly, Derek thinks. But none of this is particularly surprising, either. “Well. Luckily for you, I have something of a supply built up. Should have enough for your wayward partner.”

In the end, Derek leaves with a dozen glass vials tucked carefully away into his pockets. Peter had insisted Derek didn’t need to pay, a return to his previous joviality, but being in Peter’s debt raised Derek’s hackles almost as much as being the Argents’ did. In the end, he’d accepted the family discount and left.

Huginn and Muninn had growled at him on the way out.

| |

"We need to get rid of some of your upgrades," Derek says, matter-of-fact, the next day. Jackson had managed to find blankets to sleep with - mostly Derek’s blankets, actually, but that Jackson had so blatantly taken them off the bed amused Derek more than anything. "It'll put a dent in your debt, and some of these are ridiculous." What had Jackson’s parents been thinking, fuck - Derek wants to ask, but he already knows. They had money to burn and they wanted everyone to know it. As if the cut of Jackson’s cheekbones weren’t enough, the color of his hair, the clothes he wore.

“Take off your clothes,” Derek continues, and watches Jackson freeze. “At least down to your underwear.”

Jackson’s face is expressive. Screaming every single emotion he feels before he gets it under control. He’s terrified, uncertain, confused - and then he sneers up at Derek. "How do I know you're not just going to kill me now?"

Derek snorts. "It would have been easier when I had you trapped in the warehouse.”

"Maybe you don't want easier."

When Derek smiles, he knows it isn't at all reassuring. "Maybe I don't." He takes a step forward. Face right up against Jackson’s face. Close enough to smell the fear coming off him. “Now take off your clothes. And get - _on_ \- the table.”

The way Jackson strips - quick, efficient - shouldn’t excite Derek as much as it does. It should do the opposite, probably, since it isn’t any kind of tease. But efficiency has always done it for Derek. So has following orders. The way Jackson clambers on top of the table is almost graceful, and that doesn’t exactly leave Derek unaffected either.

Derek concentrates on strapping Jackson down instead - extra tight, because once Jackson loosens up the restraints will too. One for each foot, one for each wrist. One on his hips and chest, to be done and undone at will. Next, Derek puts the coolers on the side table. The one empty, except for the cooling packs, and the other heavy with organs.

“Replacements,” Derek says, bored, and watches Jackson’s eyes flick nervously between the cooler and the table. “Changing those designer ones _out_.”

“Don’t I - don’t I need them?” Jackson stutters. “Are you even fucking qualified to _do_ this?”

Derek smiles. He knows it isn’t particularly reassuring. “Relax, Jackson,” he says, and reaches over to pinch Jackson’s chin. “Once you learn to take them out, putting them back in is real easy.”

“I don’t -“

“You don’t have a choice,” Derek says, forcefully, because the worst thing you can do is _lie_ to yourself. This is your life. These are the facts. Jackson’s so far down on his luck going straight for death might be the better bet. It’s only clawing your way uphill from here. And ‘uphill’ is desperately relative. “ _Relax_ ,” he says again. “I’ve got something for you,” and it’s hard to ignore the way Jackson tenses. Tries to look bored when Derek pulls out the vial of Zydrate.

“I’ve done Z before.”

Derek smirked. “At one of your little Genist parties? Sure you have. The dredges your dealer charged you sky high for.” Peter had done it often enough. “This is pure. Straight from the hypothalamus.” Derek holds up the gun. The metal gleams in the light, but the Zydrate _shines_. “See the glow?”

Zydrate has never been Derek’s drug of choice - Derek doesn’t trust bliss, much less the artificially induced kind - but it’s a pretty drug. The green-blue glow, the glass vials, the metal of the gun. No wonder the pills and powders are left for the Biocons to waste their lives on. Not nearly enough flash. “One hit now, and a taste when I’m done. If you’re good.” There’s plenty more for later, tucked away. But Jackson doesn’t need to know that now.

“Will it hurt?” Again, the stink of fear. Saline tears in the corner of his eyes. They clump his eyelashes together, ridiculous eyelashes; some bioengineer had probably slaved over each one.

“It’ll hurt,” Derek says. There’s a reason Jackson is strapped to the table. “But once this stuff hits,” he continues, and puts the gun to the inside of Jackson’s thigh, “you won’t care.”

After a moment Jackson nods, and Derek squeezes the trigger. The drug hits almost instantly, straight to the brain, back from whence it came, and providing a rush like no other. Derek watches Jackson’s eyes roll back in his head, watches the fight goes out of Jackson’s body - the tensed muscles, the locked knees. All melting away until Jackson is soft, and sweaty, and pliable.

It’s easy to hook Jackson up to the stasis machine, borrowed for a pretty penny from one of the medical Repomen at the Argent facility. It’s difficult to kill someone once they’re plugged into one of these, though not impossible.

Derek’s hard again. Trying to ignore it. Trying to talk himself out of it, considering in a few minutes Jackson will be cut open.

Start at the top and work your way down, Derek thinks. The way all Repomen learn.

The eyes first. No one needs eyes like that: enhanced with tapetum lucidum, a custom blue color; self-recording, sixteen pebibytes of data stored in Jackson’s spinal cord - Derek has a replacement pair at less than half the price, and that’s at resale value. No neurological back up chip, but what part of Jackson’s shitty life was he going to want to keep re-living at this point anyway? Derek has nightmares enough without perfect recall. Then the chip from his spine, the neuro enhancers. The trickiest bit of them all, if Derek’s being truthful.

“Turn your head,” Derek says, and Jackson blinks at him myopically. The new optic nerves are attached, the artery and the vein registered as functioning, but it will take a while for his brain to accept the change. “Look at the wall and don’t move until I tell you.”

“Yeah.”

“What did I just tell you?”

“Look at the wall. Don’t move.”

Derek grabs a fistful of Jackson’s hair and pushes his head to the side. Jackson seems incapable, at present. “Good,” he says, and Jackson makes a thick, pleased noise. Derek uses the forehead strap, just in case.

After the spine are Jackson’s kidneys, one at a time; the self-healing liver. Derek has decided to leave the lungs - self-scrubbing was a good quality to have. With the air quality getting worse and worse, year by year, it might become a requirement soon enough.

He left the special made joints in Jackson’s wrists, too, but not the ones in his knees or his ankles. Athletic grade. Too valuable to ignore.

“Done?” Jackson slurs. Beads of sweat pilling his forehead. Pulse beating slow and steady.

“Nearly,” Derek murmurs. It’s easy enough to push Jackson’s skin back together. To sterilize and suture the seam. This part Derek doesn’t have as much experience with, true, but Jackson’ll be fine. Slightly scarred, maybe. But alive. “You’ve been very good.”

“I try,” and shit, Jackson’s crying. Junkies and their mood swings.

“Jackson -“

“It’s alright. Monsters aren’t supposed to be handsome,” he murmurs, and Derek has genuinely no idea how to respond to that. Isn’t sure if Jackson’s talking about himself, or Derek, or another monster that lives in his head. Derek goes to get another half-dose of Z and leaves Jackson strapped to the table.

| |

He gets Ivonne to watch Jackson while he drops off the organs, registers Jackson as a Repoman. Derek’s transferred Jackson from the table to the bed, carefully, but he shouldn’t be up and walking around.

The whole errand takes three hours, drawn out by Kate overseeing the proceedings, and Derek trying not to stab her in the face.

“I’m not sure how you stand him,” is what Ivonne says, once Derek comes back. She pulls her jacket off the back of the chair and sliding it on with an almost practiced ease. “He’s been up and whining for a good hour.”

“He has other qualities.”

She raises an eyebrow. “I never doubted that,” and Derek doesn’t know quite what to say. Ivonne is one of the only people Derek still has trouble reading. He thinks they’re friends - allies would be more appropriate - but he’s also seen her stab a man, as calm and serene as she appears just now, and he’s never entirely sure what to think of her. Who she is, and what she wants.

“Thanks for watching him,” he says instead. Laura’s desperate attempt at instilling good manners rising to the surface. “I’ll have the Graverobber get you what you need.”

“Oh, no rush,” she says, and Derek thinks she might like him owing her one.

| |

Jackson is a shitty patient. Complaining about the pain, complaining about coming down off the Z. Complaining about the scars. Complaining about the food. Complaining about being bored. Derek is completely unsurprised, but that doesn’t make him any less annoyed.

“I’ll strap you back to the table,” he grits out, finally, and that shuts Jackson up.

For a half hour, at least.

| |

All in all, recovery doesn’t take that long. Once it seems like Jackson’s new organs aren’t being rejected, Derek takes him off the stasis machine. Has Ivonne smuggle it back into GeneCo for him; she has a surprising number of friends in even more surprising places, and Derek never has a reason to doubt she can get a job done.

Three times a day Derek helps Jackson to the bathroom. Lets him do his business. Jackson bitches the entire time but Derek tunes it out and listens for the sound of his body hitting the floor, the bathroom sink.

He has to give Jackson a sponge bath on the second day, just when he starts to smell. Derek’s been keeping the wounds clean, vigilant, but it’s not the same when Jackson’s sweating out the Z, healing up. Writhing around in his sleep even tucked away safe in his bed.

Derek gives Jackson another hit of Z first. To make Jackson pliable, and sleepy. He tells himself that it’s more about _dealing_ with Jackson than anything - Jackson’s irritable, irascible, contrary, convinced he’s doing better than he is - and Derek isn’t taking advantage of him. He isn’t. He wouldn’t. Derek doesn’t spend a lot of time lying to himself about what a good person he is, but he knows he’s not the worst either. That he hasn’t yet sunk so low.

Derek scrubs down Jackson’s legs, to the soles of his feet. Jackson’s toes curl, weakly, and Derek finishes toweling him off, briskly. Probably not as gently as he should, but better than some of the alternatives.

| |

It’s inevitable, maybe, that Jackson offers to suck Derek off.

“I’m good at it,” he protests, one hand reaching for the front of Derek’s jeans.

Derek goes cold all over. Grabs for Jackson and digs his fingers into the thinnest part of Jackson’s wrists. Hard enough to bruise. “You don’t owe me anything,” he says, and barely recognizes his own voice. “You owe the Argents. You owe GeneCo. Sucking my cock isn’t going to change that,” and the flush on Jackson’s face deepens.

“I didn’t -“

“You want more Z, or not?” Derek asks brusquely. There are a few more doses left, and if Jackson has to spend the next few days in a drug haze until he’s healed, maybe the better for both of them.

There’s a long pause, like Jackson’s having some kind of internal struggle, before he nods.

“Half-dose,” Derek says. “Only a few days more. You don’t want the crash.”

“No,” Jackson says, drawing out the vowel. Almost like a sigh, when Derek puts the gun against the set of Jackson’s neck, and pulls the trigger. “ _Oh_ ,” and the sound is decidedly pornographic, this time. More real that Jackson’s carefully crafted invitation of two minutes ago.

“I like it,” Jackson says after a moment, when Derek pops the empty vial out of the slot. His voice comes out soft. He’s scared, maybe, to admit it. “The Z.”

Derek snorts. “Most people do.” There’s a reason it’s the most popular drug around, and it’s certainly not because it’s the cheapest or the easiest to find. “Come on. Time to eat.” The corner vendor had been selling something like pho - not beef, but tofu. Something like tofu. Derek always feels better not asking. He’s too good at sniffing out lies.

He settles the bowl in Jackson’s lap, cradled in an old sweatshirt. No use messing up his good work with soup burns, of all things. Jackson’s staring at him again, like Derek is this great mystery, and in a way, maybe he can’t blame Jackson for being confused.

Derek isn’t not trying to push Jackson into anything - he doesn’t want to, likes to think he would never - but the problem is that he _wants_. Of course he wants - he’s trying not to be an absolute fuck about it. Trying not to be any worse than he already is. Trying to listen to the Laura-voice in his head instead of the Peter-one, or the Kate-one. Derek holds Jackson’s life in his hands - Derek saved him, spared him, literally cradled his heart, but did it mean anything - was it anything _good_ if Derek expected something in return? Doubtful.

| |

“I need you to do something for me first,” Derek says, the morning of the seventh day.

Jackson’s jawline immediately goes taut, like he’s clenching his teeth. Gritting himself for whatever Derek is going to request. Smart boy, really. Just Jackson’s luck that Derek prefers his partners not only willing, but begging.

“Paperwork,” Derek says, and pulls the not inconsiderable stack of it out from behind his back to set on Jackson’s leg. “You need to sign it. I’d advise you to read it, but you don’t really have much to negotiate with.” He does, in point of fact - Kate is too enamored with a pretty, young face, even after all this time - but take it from Derek that paying the money is preferable.

The contract is standard GeneCo schlock - suck at your job, and we’ll repossess you; don’t follow our orders, and we’ll repossess you; here’s your bill, here’s your astronomical interest rate; take too long, and we’ll kill you anyway.

One of the last pages is Jackson’s accounting. Returning the original organs put a dent in it, but it’ll be slow going from then on out. Jackson’s going to be in their clutches for a very long time.

“Jesus,” Jackson says, looking at the bottom line, and Derek feels his mouth curl into something like a grin.

“What did you think your life was worth?” he says. “Less?” and Jackson’s wide eyes make him think, well, maybe he did.

| |

After a week, Jackson is nearly ready to be out on his own. Possibly - probably - Derek should ease Jackson into his new job, since he was just on the operating table himself. But there’s no use letting him get cold feet. No use letting Jackson make stories up in his head. And there’s no time like the present, with the interest rates the Argents charge.

Derek thinks about at least doing the killing that first time. Letting Jackson just watch. But it’s better, perhaps, to have Jackson dive right in. Get his hands dirty. Even fuck up, a little.

“Here,” Derek says, and presses the scalpel into Jackson’s hand. “From the top of the shoulder. Tip to tip. Across the collarbones. Meeting at the sternum. There are other ways, but we only want the heart.”

Jackson looks green around the edges. Sweaty.

The first one’s the hardest, Derek wants to tell him, but the truth is that somewhere down the line, there will be something worse - someone who looks like your father, your sister, the first person you ever had a crush on. And it will be your job to kill them.

“Got it?” Derek asks, and if he has a hand reassuringly pressed to the wing of Jackson’s shoulder, who can blame him?

“Got it,” Jackson says, and swallows hard.

He holds it together until he accidentally separates the stomach from the small intestine; their victim hadn’t skimped on lunch.

“Take your faceguard off before you puke,” Derek says sharply when Jackson staggers away, and goes to finish the rest himself.

Jackson hovers at Derek’s elbow when he comes back. "You're good at this," he says hesitantly. There’s a clear delineation between Jackson’s back alley hack job and Derek’s quick, clever plucking.

"Kate Argent taught me,” Derek says placidly. One of the best, at least in this. “She said I had the stomach for it.” Derek can’t disagree with that assessment. No matter what he’s done it’s never once made him particularly ill. Not physically. “But I've never been like her. Never had the inclination,” Derek continues. "Not like she did."

“An inclination,” Jackson repeats, flatly. “What the fuck kind of person has an _inclination_ for this.”

Derek shrugs.

| |

When it comes down to it, though, Derek’s not wrong. Jackson’s good at it. Derek is as surprised as anyone else, in a way, but he’s not wrong. Jackson has the stones for it, the guts. The skills aren't there yet, but the first time he pukes turns out to be the last, and that's good enough for Derek.

"Good," Derek says. "Very good." He puts his hand on the back of Jackson's neck. Heavy, protected by the thick rubber gloves, but he can still feel the way Jackson shivers, delicately.

| |

Derek sends Jackson home ahead. Derek can drop off the organs this time; take care of the body. He isn’t wholly without compassion - Jackson needs privacy to throw up a few more times, to stand on shaking legs in the shower and cry. Past experience makes it seem like he’s a crier.

Derek brings home Indian. An indulgence, and one that Jackson favors. He devours the palak, the vegetable curry. A mountain of rice. His eyes look only a little red, and he fights with Derek about what movie he wants to watch; Derek still wins.

“Derek?”

Derek looks away from the screen. “Hm?”

“I - Good night,” Jackson says. Standing at the end of the hallway. Backlit, so Derek can’t see his face. Only the shape of his body. Turned toward him.

“Good night,” Derek says, after a moment. Then, before he thinks better of it: “Good job, today,” and Jackson’s head nods, jerkily, before he darts into his room. Door not quite slammed shut.

Derek gives himself fifteen minutes. He watches half of some new reality show - something vapid, confrontational, more screaming than Derek hears in his own damn job - before he goes into his room and jerks off. On his stomach, humping against the mattress and into his hand. Imagining Jackson beneath him. The nape of his neck between Derek’s teeth. The sweet way he might cry, the way Derek wants to _make_ him cry.

The problem isn’t that Derek doesn’t want Jackson. The problem isn’t even that Jackson doesn’t want Derek. The problem is that Derek wants him to ask. Jackson is like a kicked dog. The kind who likes to bite, doesn’t trust anyone - and where a fucking _Genist_ got such trust issues, Derek doesn’t know - but Derek has to learn to gentle him, to get him to trust. He could fuck Jackson anytime he wanted, but that’s not it, in the end. That’s not enough. He wants to _own_ him, Derek thinks. Utterly. Only utterly will do.

Derek doesn’t even know if that’s good or bad - does he want Jackson to ask in order to make sure it’s really what he wants? Does Jackson have to make the first move because it isn’t fair for Derek to? Because Jackson might feel he has to? Or does Derek _want_ Jackson to ask, just because he wants Jackson to beg? Wants to hear Jackson ask? Wants the pleasure of saying yes? Wants that power?

| |

Even once Jackson recovers, he’s a shitty roommate. Derek wasn’t actually expecting any differently. Jackson has spent a lifetime being waited on, hand on foot, wanting for nothing, getting everything, and never even having to think about it.

The problem is that Derek is too stubborn to give him a free pass. It would be easy to let Jackson coast by, to cook and clean - Derek doesn’t do much of that, even - but Jackson seems determined to be terrible at everything. He can’t cook: after he burns his fourth dinner attempt in a row, Derek sends him out to one of the stands, and he at least comes back with something Derek likes. He doesn’t clean up after himself - Derek finds that you can make a man clean, but you can’t make him scrub, or scrub _well_ , and he has a sudden, gut-tearing flash of sympathy for his sister. What a terror Derek must have been to her.

“You think you’d get tired of spending all this time on your knees,” Derek says, softly, but from the way Jackson stiffens, shoulders hunching, it’s clear he hears.

“Is there even a point to cleaning some place so filthy?” Jackson shoots back. “Our sink is sparkling, but there’s fucking _mold_ growing on the coffee table.”

Derek snorts. “Guess we found another chore to add to the list,” still soft, and Jackson actually growls.

| |

Over the next few weeks Jackson learns the two other ways to open a body, how to take out organs before the body subsides to shock, how to package the organs properly, where to drop them off, where to deposit the bodies, how to fill out the paperwork GeneCo requires in triplicate, how to make sure his money gets deposited. He extracts a few dozen major organs and a few more delicate pieces, learns how to make a halfway decent pancake, and breaks the coffee table with a vicious, unapologetic grin.

And then there’s this _fucker_.

There’s a guy on the table – Harris something or other, who cares – but he’s making Jackson hesitate. Selling a sob story about his kids, his _kids_ , how is his family going to live without him, and Derek can’t help the cold expression that stretches out his face.

“You’ve all got kids,” Derek says. Disinterested. “And even if you do, what good’s a dad on the run going to be anyway? You think GeneCo won’t come for your family?” He sneers. He knows all about that, knows exactly what happens when the first plan fails. The checklist of actions they’ll go through. “At least this way GeneCo won’t come after them. Did you know - they don’t have the cloning process down, precisely, for children’s organs? Not proper ones that grow. There’s quite a market for a fresh supply.” He’s not sure who looks more horrified, then - Jackson or the guy on the table. Maybe he really does have kids. Doesn’t matter.

“Move,” Derek growls instead, fully prepared to hip-check Jackson out of the way and get started himself, when Jackson straightens himself up. Like someone injected steel in his spine.

“I’ve got it,” he says instead, and pulls a long Y-shape from the tops of the man’s shoulders to the bottom of the sternum. Derek wipes the blood away, absently, as the man screams.

“The chest plate -” Derek begins. They’re here for the lungs, mainly, and it’s delicate. It’s more difficult with a scalpel, but Jackson isn’t trained for the saw yet.

“I know,” Jackson interrupts, and even hidden behind the faceguard, Derek is sure he’s rolling his eyes.

| |

“Good job,” Derek says again, back at the apartment. Trying to keep the peace, maybe. He knows Jackson likes compliments, likes to feel like Derek is paying attention. He doesn’t get stir crazy, exactly, but he demands Derek’s attention when Derek doesn’t give it freely.

“I _know_ ,” Jackson snarls, harsher than earlier, and he slams the door to him room like a child.

Derek doesn’t feel particularly bad about cooking dinner for one, even if the look Jackson gives him when he comes out to only stir-fried tofu scraps sticking to the pan might have felled a lesser man.

| |

A month later Jackson trades a tablet they’d taken off a victim for a bed – a piece of shit bed, heavy as fuck, and he complains until Derek helps him drag it down the stairs and assemble it in his room.

“You have fucking - _super strength_ ,” Jackson practically screams. Practically squished under a mattress, and Derek really shouldn’t feel quite so amused. “Could you help?”

“And you don’t?” Derek asks. Jackson doesn’t, actually - Derek’s looked over the list of his upgrades enough to know Jackson’s body probably better than Jackson does - but he’s been primed enough to out-anything just about any Biocon on the streets. His heart, his blood cells. His reflexes. Would have been cheaper just to grow Jackson in a vat, Derek thinks, instead of spending as much as his parents did on upgrades.

“Just help me already!” and Derek gets off the couch in the spirit of compromise, and maybe a little for how he can feel Jackson’s eyes track him. The flex of his arms.

It’s a good bed, Derek is forced to admit, in the end. Solid. Probably why Jackson got it so cheaply - who the fuck was going to drag that thing anywhere. Derek regrets it a little even now. _He’s_ not going to be enjoying it. But he still feels a knot ease in his chest, a worry he didn’t even know he was carrying around. Jackson isn’t leaving.

When the bed’s all assembled Jackson flops on top of it. Limbs splayed, lightly sweating. It’s a good picture, but not necessarily where Derek’s self-control is concerned.

“Are we having tofu for dinner again?”

“What do you think,” Derek retorts, nerves frayed, and Jackson rolls his eyes so hard something probably should pop.

Derek doesn’t think about thumbing over Jackson’s cheekbones. About sliding the head of his dick between Jackson’s lips. About choking Jackson with his cock.

Definitely goddamn tofu.

| |

Kate shows up at their apartment on a Monday morning. She’s waiting patiently outside the door when Derek gets there, but he isn’t sure how long that will last.

“What are you doing here,” he asks, flatly, when she slips by him. Snarls, “you stay _outside_ ,” at her bodyguard entourage when they try to follow her in. Like wayward puppies.

Kate makes a little flicking motion with her wrist. “Oh Derek,” she coos. “Look at this place! You’d think we weren’t paying you!”

Derek slams the door shut with something a little like satisfaction. If only Kate were on the other side of it.

“What are you doing here?” he asks again. “You know I’m more than happy to visit your office,” the sarcasm clear to both of them.

“Mm. I’m actually here for your partner.”

That doesn’t surprise Derek at all. “Not here.”

Kate tilts her head. “Aw, Der. You know better than to lie to me.”

He does, actually; he just enjoys it.

“Coffee?” he asks instead, and Jackson chooses that moment to wander in.

It’s a sight - Jackson in only sweatpants, hanging low off his hips. Sleep rumpled, warm and soft-looking, hair going every which way. Derek wants to push him up against the countertop. Press his palm against the swell of Jackson’s morning wood. Watch the widening of his eyes, and the way his mouth would fall open, and the stuttering, low way he’d beg. Derek can only imagine how Kate feels.

“Wow,” Kate says, and gives Jackson a dazzling smile. “You’re him, huh?”

Jackson blinks at her, momentarily confused at the woman in their living room – an unnatural occurrence – and there’s a moment where Derek thinks Jackson might actually be pissed. A woman? That was the only thing standing in the way here, a _woman_?

“Jackson Whittemore,” Derek says, sourly. “Meet Kate Argent.”

Kate smiles widens, a little. She tosses her hair and Jackson’s attention shifts. He turns _on_ , like a spotlight, and Derek watches Kate soak it up.  
Jackson is hard to resist. Charismatic. It’s still there, even after gutting him of all the things that made him most valuable.

“Pleased to meet you,” he says, and they shake hands. It’s all very polite, very proper, if Kate didn’t look like a shark in blood-infested water.

“You know, I just couldn’t understand why Derek would keep a soft little thing like you around,” Kate says. Low and smooth. “Derek and me – well, we go way back. I don’t know if he told you. I like to think I know a little of his tastes, and you were a _puzzle_. But now I think I see why.”

Her hand is on Jackson’s face. Derek isn’t reacting well. The upside being that Jackson isn’t, either. He’s still smiling, but he’s gone still. Quiet. Like that doesn’t incite Kate’s lust even more.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” Derek asks. He tries to inject as much boredom into the question as he can. “People to kill, lives to ruin?”

Kate sighs. “It _is_ a Monday.” She pats Jackson’s cheek, once, and swans out of the apartment with about as much fanfare as she took entering it.

After Kate leaves, the silence in the apartment is deafening.

“So that’s the infamous Kate Argent,” Jackson says after a moment. Head ducked down.

“Yeah.” Derek takes a few more moments to answer. Several deep breaths. Uses calming exercises that Deaton tried to teach him, once upon a time. “Yeah, that’s her. Not like the tabloids paint her.”

“No,” Jackson agrees, too quickly. “I thought she was supposed to be – ”

“Nice?” Derek says dryly. The PR department puts a lot of work into that. Kate runs GeneCo’s Zydrate support network, technically. What a fucking laugh. “She’s a bitch on wheels. Practically the only thing you should be afraid of, in this city.”

“I knew _that_ ,” Jackson says, peevishly, and that’s a bit more like it. “She was the one who wanted to gut me like a fish.”

“So was I. So _did_ I.”

Jackson’s head snaps up so quickly Derek worries about whiplash. “Not the same.”

“No?”

“She gave the order. You – you were going to do it. But you saw me.”

Maybe. Derek saw something. But the truth is Jackson’s probably giving him a little too much credit.

“You saw me,” Jackson says again, like it’s important, like Derek has any idea what the hell is going on in this kid’s brain, ever.

“I don’t know what you are,” Derek says, lost, and Jackson’s face crumples inward.

“Fuck off,” he says, halfway to belligerent, to the kind of pissed off mood that lingers for days, and Derek moves before he can think about it. He pushes Jackson up against the wall. Brackets him in with his arms and kisses him, open-mouthed. Wet. Jackson is sleep-sour, warm, the faintest hint of Kate’s perfume lingering on his cheek, and Derek _bites_. Holds Jackson down when he moans, when he pushes back. Holds onto him until Jackson slumps. Lets his head fall back against the wall, and Derek noses the line of Jackson’s neck. Humid. Sweaty. Jackson only.

“I want to figure you out,” Derek says, and Jackson shudders. “Get inside you. Make you mine.”

Derek can’t help feeling that if Jackson had half a brain, he’d be running for the hills. His hand comes up to curl over the back of Jackson’s head. Puts his mouth to Jackson’s ear. “I don’t share well.” Consider that a last warning.

Jackson snorts. “Yeah, no shit.” He thinks he knows, and yet –

“I mean it,” Derek says evenly; then pitches his voice low. Dark. Lets his teeth graze the side of Jackson’s neck. “I wanted to fuck you from the moment you ran. Because I wanted to chase you, and win, and take what I wanted. I think about tying you up. I think about holding you down. I think about when my hands were inside you, slick with your blood.”

Jackson makes a little broken noise - like fear, Derek thinks, until Jackson’s arms tighten around Derek’s neck. A stranglehold.

“Last chance to run,” he continues. It’s tender, a little. Confidential. “Last chance to go somewhere else. Find some nice boy to fuck you.” Someone who doesn’t think about making you cry.

“No,” Jackson says. Lips trembling against the side of Derek’s face. Too heavy for a kiss, too long. A prayer.

“Then get on your knees,” Derek says, and Jackson drops like a stone.

| |

“You’re good at that,” Derek says. “Very… practiced,” the word like a lash, and Jackson’s eyelashes dip. His mouth full of Derek’s cock, and half his throat too. Sucking hard, sucking perfectly, swallowing around Derek until he comes with a groan, a grunt – digs his nails in the back of Jackson’s neck hard enough to draw blood.

Derek runs his thumb over the corner of Jackson’s mouth. Wet. Letting his softening dick slide off Jackson’s plush, puffy lips. “Beautiful little cocksucker,” and Jackson _would_ flush harder at that. Twitch hard enough to be seen through his jeans. “Is that what you wanted? To suck my cock?” and Jackson looks torn. Should he say ‘yes’ or ‘more’?

Derek takes the decision from him; pulls Jackson up, stumbling over his feet, and pushes him against the wall. Gets Jackson braced on his forearms, one hand already sliding down the front of Jackson’s jeans. Jackson’s breathing has already gone fast and quick, a step below panicky, and Derek puts his mouth to the back of Jackson’s neck. He might have a - fixation, of sorts, with it. The vulnerability. The pinprick tiny scars. The tiny flecks of blood, and the matching spots under Derek’s nails.

When Jackson comes - spilling over Derek’s fist in short, hot bursts - Derek bites down. Blood on his teeth too.

| |

Afterwards, Jackson can’t look Derek in the eye. Curled in on himself, if only metaphorically, and one hand worrying the inside of his pocket.

Derek shrugs off his shirt, tosses it on the back of a chair, and sheds the rest of his clothes all the way to Jackson’s huge, ridiculous bed.

Jackson crawls in a few minutes later.

“Possessive,” Derek murmurs. “Remember?”

Inside the circle of his arms, Jackson nods.

| |

Jackson likes when Derek holds him down, like being tied down; likes blowing Derek, likes getting fucked; likes being bitten, and biting; likes being on his knees. Likes being called good, sweet, pretty, or any combination of the three with ‘boy’. Hates any implication he’s less than intelligent, that he’s average. He doesn’t particularly enjoy morning sex, or anything that gets him more than a little messy. He hates when Derek frustrates him to the point of tears, though – oh, Derek does, and Jackson likes _that_.

Jackson is, in some ways, a terribly contrary creature. Sometimes the more Jackson doesn’t like something, the more he likes being told to do it. One morning Derek makes him scrub out the bathroom, clean out their fridge, air out their bed – a half dozen little things while Derek catches up on paperwork – and Jackson stomps around the house like a stormcloud. Derek barely looks up when he’s done, a simple, ‘good boy,’ and Jackson is pinking. Suddenly awkward. All righteous indignation gone.

“Come here,” Derek says, and Jackson hesitates a moment. Clearly stuck between sitting next to Derek on the couch and kneeling at his feet. “ _Here_ ,” Derek says again, and shifts to the corner of the couch. A clear space for Jackson to shift into.

Something about Jackson makes Derek want to sink his teeth in, bury his hands inside of Jackson, all the way inside. He wants Jackson in his bed, wants him warming the sheets, wants the smell of him on Derek’s clothes. His hand on the back of Jackson’s neck like a brand. Like a collar.

“You’re mine,” he says, and Jackson shivers underneath his hand, hard. Leans back into his touch. He turns around to press his nose to the hollow of Derek’s throat. To breathe him in, to press a kiss there, trembling, and Derek is struck with a sudden rush of affection, protectiveness, possessiveness - all wrapped up and tied together. Jackson is something unaccountably precious to him, upgrades or no upgrades, common blood beating through a designer heart.

| |

Derek is having a good week. Something from the grocer’s that was definitely in the fowl family; three extractions in the past few days, easy as pie; and the day before Derek and Jackson had gotten into a fistfight, of sorts, that had ended with rug-burn on both their knees, Derek’s side, Jackson’s face, and Derek two fingers deep in Jackson, dry, before Jackson cried for mercy. Or as he’d put it – “Jesus _Christ_ , get the lube, you fucking maniac” -  
In retrospect, maybe that should have been his first sign. Too much good karma coming his way.

He gets a message from Ivonne. _Stop by the bar_. She’s sitting on a stool when he gets there, heels hooked delicately around the rungs. She slides a drink across the counter towards him first thing. A hefty serving of bourbon, and not the usual rotgut either.

“I have some interesting news,” she says. Not quite a purr, but with - something underneath. “I suggest you drink up first.”

| |

Derek slams into Peter’s house with the force of a hurricane. He feels just as destructive, just as powerful. A force outside of human reason.  
“Word on the street is that Kate’s dead.”

“I’d never contradict the word on the street,” Peter says smoothly, and Derek _growls_. Slams his uncle against the wall. He can hear Huginn and Muninn snarling outside, scratching at the door, but Peter barely moves.

“Did you —” Derek asks. “Was it _you_? Did you have anything to do with it? Did _you_ -“ and Peter, still, says nothing. Which is as good as a confession, as far as Derek is concerned. Peter can talk his way out of almost anything. Unless he doesn’t want to.

“I never asked you to,” Derek says. Weak. Thin. A lot like the boy he hasn’t been for a very long time. “I never -

“Did you really think I wouldn’t?” Peter counters. “If not for you, for Laura? For all of them?”

For a moment Derek feels… paralyzed. It’s as close as they’ve ever come to discussing it. Derek’s part in it. And Peter’s. Maybe if they’d hashed it out earlier. Figured out precisely where the blame fell, instead of stewing in it and throwing it at once another by turns. Maybe things would be different. Maybe Peter wouldn’t have the scars on his face - wouldn’t make a living selling Z, would never have done it himself - maybe Derek wouldn’t be this gnarled, fucked up _thing_ \- maybemaybemaybe.

"Doesn't mean you've forgiven me though,” Peter continues softly. “Sometimes I think you have no intention of forgiving me, regardless of anything I do.”

Derek's fists tighten. "I want to." His voice comes out tight and desperate. Higher than he would have liked.

Peter smile is thin. Wan. "Maybe someday." He puts his hands over Derek’s fists. Pulls Derek’s fingers free and lets him go. Ever so gently. “Give my best to your partner. I hear he’s quite the Repoman himself. Or so the word on the street would have me believe.”

| |

“Are you angry that he did it?” Jackson asks him, later. Derek came home angry, sad, twisted up - and Jackson had hesitated. Gone down on his knees next to Derek, tentatively, and rested his head on Derek’s leg while Derek carded his hands through Jackson’s hair. A little hard. Strong. He’d pulled Jackson up into his lap, after, and kissed him, lazily. Beard burn all over Jackson’s face and neck. It had felt… good. Just being there. “Or angry that he beat you to it?”

The worst part is that Derek doesn’t fucking know.

| |

“Let me tie you up," Derek asks, and sees that Jackson is about to acquiesce, almost out of habit – ‘tied up’ is old hat; ‘tied up’ is their Tuesday night. "On the table."

“The - the extraction table?” Jackson says, stuttering just slightly over the words. “Like –”

“Just like,” Derek says. Like where Derek cut Jackson open and put him together again. Like where they cut people open for money. Like that.

Is it fucked up? Derek asks himself, and immediately thinks - it must be, God, people have died on that thing. People _will_ die on that thing.

"Yes." Jackson licks his lips. Once, twice. Tongue flicking out over his lips. Derek can see the way he’s shaking. Knees locking. Probably the palms of his hands going clammy, stomach a bundle of knots, all at once. Derek likes to kiss him like that. As if he’d being held up by lips alone. “Yeah. Okay."

| |

“Too tight?” Derek asks, when he straps Jackson’s wrists down. Not as tight as last time, but still plenty tight.

“No.”

“Good.” Ankles next. “Flex for me,” Derek orders, and watches the line of Jackson’s calves. “Good. Good boy,” mostly for the way Jackson’s eyes slide closed.

Once he gets Jackson strapped to the table, Derek takes his time looking. Runs the knife up the line of Jackson’s throat, under his chin, pressing into the skin hard enough that Jackson tilts his head back and swallows hard. Adam’s apple bobbing. The line of Jackson’s throat might be Derek’s next favorite thing about him. He leaves bruises there, teeth marks, little hickies. Proof over and over again that Jackson is owned. Derek scrapes a ragged nail over one of the bruises he left earlier this week. Bends down to kiss Jackson, to press the palm of his hands against the trachea, and push. Just a little press. Just to make him choke.

Derek is easy - desperately, incredibly easy - when it comes to kissing. Jackson likes to rebel against it; Derek has to catch him off guard, has to wear him down. Or tie him down, as the case may be, before he can usual kiss long and slow. Derek’s hand still on Jackson’s neck. At this angle, it doesn't take long for Derek to get a crick in his neck; doesn't take long for Jackson’s mouth to become swollen, and Derek switches to tracing the scars on Jackson’s chest. Where Derek had already cut him open once.

Jackson makes a choked noise – a gasping half-sob, the kind of noise that goes straight through Derek, a shot to the heart, and he sets the knife down. Unzips his pants to pull his cock out and stroke it. Slow. Fattening it up before grabbing a fistful of Jackson’s hair, yanking his head to the side. 

“Open up,” he says. Harsh. He uses one hand to guide his cock towards Jackson’s mouth, the other hooking in the side of Jackson’s mouth and pulling. The angle is awkward, but that’s what he wants - the antithesis of Jackson’s precise, expert blowjobs. He loves fucking Jackson’s mouth, sloppy, the way Jackson hates, less than picture perfect. Jackson probably taught himself to deep throat on the same unsuspecting soul he gave his first blowjob to, sucking the poor bastard dry until he could do it just right. Jackson does _everything_ Just Right, Perfect, Just So, and sometimes Derek just likes to see Jackson at his worst. Undone. Shoving until Jackson’s face turns red, until tears cling to the ends of his eyelashes. Derek loves that, _loves_ that, loves when Jackson cries. Choking, slightly, when Derek shoves too far, too fast.

Derek’s hand is still pressed to Jackson’s cheek, holding him down. Thumbing over the corner of Jackson’s mouth, slipping the ends of his fingers in. Watching his lips stretch. Listen to those perfect, wet sounds of distress. Jackson’s hard now, begging for attention with every lift of his hips, thrusting as far off the table as he can. Derek thinks about slapping him a few times - Jackson likes that; hates that he likes that, like so many things – enough to get him off, maybe. Derek likes fucking Jackson when he’s gone soft. When there’s nothing left for him to focus on but Derek inside of him.

Derek loosens Jackson’s left leg instead. Folds it at the knee, shoves it up and out of the way so he can push his face down between Jackson’s legs; licking him open, tongue stuck inside, while Jackson writhes around. Shoving himself onto Derek's face, fuck, yanking against the restraints. Hard enough to hurt himself, to strain his shoulders, and Derek will have to push the knots out later, press them loose.

"Calm  _down_ ," Derek hisses. Freeing Jackson's second leg is trickier already - Derek's fingers are clumsy with arousal, slicked with spit and sweat – without Jackson writhing around like

 "Then fuck me," Jackson hisses back, voice pitched a half-octive higher; guaranteed to drive Derek up a wall. Whick Deren takes as permission to throw both of Jackson’s legs up over his shoulders. To fuck Jackson hard, forceful and a little terrible, while the rubberized plastic underneath them creaks and whines against Jackson’s sweaty skin.

“Don’t come,” Derek threatens. "You come before I give you permission, and I'll leave you strapped to this table until -”

He stutters for a second when Jackson clenches around him, and Jackson asks, breathless, unaccountably cocky, “you'll _what_?”

“I’ll make you cry,” he grits out, and it’s no idle threat. Jackson knows how much Derek likes that, and how much Jackson hates it – how he tries to hide his face, and Derek won’t let him.

“Freak,” Jackson taunts. Like he isn’t willingly strapped to a Repoman’s table, being fucked by the man once sent to kill him. “You - fuck. Let me come, then. _Make_ me come,” he says – a little weakly; out of breath, each hitch in time with being fucked. “Fuckin’ make me.”

Derek doesn’t do well with dares. Jackson knows this. There was an incident on the dancefloor at one of the local clubs they frequent. Used to frequent. They got a little kicked out. Doesn't matter, now. Jackson is hot around him, now – gone soft, giving, and every time Derek thrusts he swears he gets a little deeper, right into the very center of Jackson; fucks a little harder, and Jackson ripples around him. Moans.

Derek comes first but it's a close thing. Buried in Jackson, one hand scratching at his chest, thick red lines next to subtler scars. When Jackson whines, pissed off, desperate - his impatience taking on a sexual charge, won't-you-won't-you-won't-you - Derek pulls out, carefully, before pushing his fingers back in. Three all at once, deep, while the other hand tugs at Jackson's dick. Just a shade too hard.

“Fuck,” Jackson swears. “Fuck, fuck, fuck –” Jerking up against the restraints, head slamming back against the table. The whole thing shaking like it could fall to pieces.

| |

The table kind of turns into one of their things. Jackson looks so _pretty_ , stretched out; when he struggles, delicately textured bruises from the cuffs - GeneCo doesn’t build much for comfort - and Derek catches Jackson touching them after, enough, to think that padding a pair would be amiss.

Sometimes Derek uses a knife, or a scalpel. The cold edge running down Jackson’s chest, mapping the faint scars. Pricking Jackson's nipples. The blunt edge of a knife, ice cold, against the soft skin just behind Jackson’s balls. The gloves. The rubber Repoman gear, and specialty pair of leather ones Derek splurges on for his birthday.

“You’re mine,” Derek says. “Mine.” This body he made, that he ripped apart and put back together, and it wasn’t even for himself. Isn’t that the kicker.

“Yours,” Jackson says.

| |

There are bad days. The week Jackson has to help collect a girl he went to school with. The week they collect on a _kid_. Every so often there will be someone who reminds Derek of Laura, or his parents. Dark hair. Slim build. Even something in the tone of their voice. There was a young man, once – artistic looking guy, long blonde hair. Nothing at all like Derek’s family in appearance; but he’d pled in French, sobbed it out, and it had reminded Derek of his mother, of when his grandfather had died. He’d started shaking so hard he pierced the guy’s liver.

The difference now is that Jackson is there. The big difference. The point. The kicker. And Derek starts expecting Jackson to be there, starts planning on it. He doesn’t know what ends up scaring him more - that he’s thinking about the future, or that Jackson’s supposed to be in it.

Jackson makes Derek move out of the basement apartment. Buys him clothing with colors. Practically learns to cry on command. He never really figures out how to properly cook tofu, but that’s all right – Derek brings a few things to the table too.

 _Oh brother_ , he can practically hear Laura say. _Baby brother, at least you never make the same mistake twice._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cut _several_ thousand words from this part of the story; there could conceivably be a related PWP, or a flash-forward sometime in the future.


	3. hello, wherever you are

When Laura and Derek were orphaned, Peter took them in without a second thought. He might not have ever been the altruist his sister was, the same kind of willing martyr Laura would become, but they were family. They were blood, the kind that didn’t come from a lab, and that always meant something to Peter. He always loved them. Always. He may have failed them, admittedly, but he loved them. He tried. 

 Maybe he was just too broken, he thinks. Even then, everything about him too broken, but still too graspingly clever to give up and die. 

| |

“So _many_  bottles,” Stiles says. He flicks one with the tip of his fingernail, and the clear crystal sound rings out in the small room. Almost metallic. “I’d ask what you were doing, but I’m not sure I’d like the answer.” 

“I’m expecting Scott later today,” Peter says mildly. Doesn’t have to even be watching Stiles to know he’s making a particular face. He always tells Stiles when Scott is due, though Stiles seems to have a sixth sense about when he’s going to stop by anyway. Years of practice. Years of friendship. They both still call it a friendship, even if they haven’t been face to face in years. “He asked about you again,” Peter continues. “And your father -“

“Stop,” Stiles says. He doesn’t raise his voice. Doesn’t sound upset, even, but Peter knows their boundaries. Scott is a wavering line in Stiles’s life, prone to mood swings, but Stiles’s family - his life before Peter knew him - is a hard line. “I’ll just see you tonight, okay?”

“Alright,” Peter says. “One for the road?” but Stiles is already out the door. 

Peter doesn’t know where Stiles goes when they aren’t together. Stiles is always crawling in and out, unannounced. Like an alley cat. A resourceful, clever thing, Stiles - might be begging at other back doors even now.

Strangely enough, Peter has always thought of himself as a dog person - senselessly loving, dependable, loyal to the point of stupidity. Unconditional acceptance. None of that really describes _Peter_ , of course - just what Peter wants.  Peter is dogged, though. Unyielding. Good at chasing things down.

A bloodhound and an alley cat, he thinks; surely there have been stranger pairs.

| |

Scott does come by later; this time with a minimum of fuss. His new partner is at his side again, a delectable little thing - tall, wide-eyed, outwardly cowering but subtly vicious, and Peter has to bite back remarks about replacing Stiles. Sometimes that causes histrionics, of a sort, as if Scott thinks Peter has Stiles tied up in a basement somewhere. As if Stiles doesn’t have a freedom of movement in his life that even Peter sometimes envies. Peter puts up with it because Scott is Peter’s best worker - very dependable, very good at getting the right people to help him. He hates Peter on principle, which makes him somewhat of a hypocrite, considering Scott robs graves and desecrates the dead, but no one brings Peter Zydrate quite as fresh. Well worth the extra price. 

| |

Stiles slips back in that night, as promised. Huginn and Muninn don’t bark, don’t growl. Peter has never seen Stiles feed them or drug them, try to frighten them or hurt them. Maybe they’re simply as lovelorn as their owner.

Peter isn’t asleep yet. He rarely sleeps; rarely rests even when he does sleep. Would certainly wake upon Stiles sliding up next to him, trembling like a leaf. 

“I need some Z,” he says, quietly. Eyes screwed shut. Body shuddering. Not the worst Peter’s ever seen him, but far from flying high. Far from painless, or thoughtless. Caught in the aches of his body and the torment of his mind.

Peter doesn’t love Stiles because he’s a junkie, but in spite of it. He’s not saying there aren’t benefits - the pliability, the sweetness of the sweat upon his brow, upon his body; the neediness, the sweetness, the beautiful smiles and the helpless laughter. Peter can’t say he doesn’t enjoy those particular qualities. But a Stiles strung out on Z is also a Stiles who isn’t quite _there_ , and Peter is jealous enough, demanding enough, to want Stiles’s full attention. He enjoys more when Stiles is lucid - his temper, his sarcasm, the faces he makes. When he argues with Peter, spars with him. When <i> _he </i> _fucks Peter, or fucks himself on Peter, more awake, more aware. Less languid, less accepting. More demanding, more greedy. Everything a bright beautiful boy should be.

 _So why_ — you might ask, and it’s a fair question, really — _why do you give him the Z anyway?_

Because otherwise he’d find it somewhere else, Peter thinks, from someone who would make demands. And how intolerable a thought is that.

“There’s always some for you, sweet boy,” he says, and strokes Stiles’s brow until he settles against Peter with a sigh. Settled. Soothed. Sometimes Stiles likes to run his fingers over Peter’s scars. Will push his face up against Peter’s and rub, slowly; sandpaper his young, soft skin against Peter’s raised scars. Still twitching, faintly, but they can’t have everything. 

Peter puts the gun to the base of Stiles’s neck, just under the brain stem, and pulls the trigger.

| |

“How do you not do it?” Stiles asks one day. “The Z, I mean,” like they could be talking of anything else. “You’re around it ALL the time,” like that’s a foregone conclusion. And for Stiles, it probably is. There are needlepricks in the crooks of his elbows, his knees. The vee where his legs meet his torso. The nape of his neck. They’re pebbled, raised slightly under Peter’s fingertips. Much prettier than Peter’s own scars. More socially acceptable, even - who hasn’t had a taste of Z, now and then? And who leaves scars on their face, in this day and age? 

Peter thinks about it for a moment. Idly strokes through Stiles’s hair. “I was on it, once. Hooked. Worse than you are now. I hit bottom, and kept digging, and filled those holes with bodies. It was only…” He pauses. Peter isn’t exactly prone to feeling embarrassment, or shame - it was never how he was wired, even before - but this, oh, this — “Only when I started to extract Zydrate from my niece’s brain that I realized how fucked up I was. How far things had gotten. How out of control.” There are many sins Peter can forgive, many faults that can be borne, but _control_ — “I quit that day. And never looked back.”

Stiles is quiet, and shivery. Picking at his nails even as he presses his face into Peter’s chest.

“You don’t have to,” Peter says, soothingly. “As long as I’m around, you’ll be set."

Or maybe that’s what you’re afraid of, he thinks, as Stiles burrows closer to him. Maybe you wish someone would make you stop. Maybe I should lock you in the basement, the way Scott is always so afraid of. 

"I don't want to quit," Stiles mumbles. "I hate remembering."

Someday you'll hate forgetting, Peter wants to tell him, you’ll hate that you’ve forgotten, you’ll hate the faded details, the wallpaper of your brain. You’ll hate that you won’t even remember what you’ve lost, but he knows Stiles won't listen. No one ever does. The Graverobber comes with a warning written all over his face, with every word he speaks, but the only thing people take in is the glow.

| |

These days, every knock on the door startles Peter. He doesn’t get a lot of random visitors. No street junkies looking for their fix. He leaves the volume to the quick young things - the plastic vials, the dull glows, the subpar Z pulled from already drained brains. Peter transitioned to quality a few years back. Even Huginn and Muninn only growl a little, softly, as the door opens. 

In his Repo gear, Boyd fills nearly the entire frame. A frightening picture, if Peter had anything at all to be frightened of. Peter has friends in high places - and that’s all anyone really needs, isn’t it? Friends in the right places? 

"She requests your presence." It would be hard to call Boyd’s tone _mocking_ , but there’s an underlying thread that never fails to make Peter smile.

Peter waves one hand artfully. "I assumed. Just another minute. Can't leave in the middle of the process. I'm sure you understand."

Boyd looks distinctly unimpressed. “Your funeral, Graverobber.”

| |

Peter calls her princess. Queen of the castle. It's shameless flattery but she expects it, in some measure, and it's not precisely untrue. It doesn't gall him nearly as much as would other things.

"You know what I like about you, Graverobber?" Kate asks. Empty Z vial slipping slowly around her fingers. "You never stare at my tits. Even Boyd here sneaks a peek now and again," though Boyd's impassive face doesn't betray a thing, "but you never do."

"They're fantastic breasts,” Peter says, because he's nothing but an honest man when it comes to the female form. "They're just not my particular cup of tea," and Kate cracks up. "I prefer my companions male, slender, and… well, rather young.”

Kate sighs. Laughter cut off as quickly as it had begun. "Mmm, me too. Me  _too_ ,” she drawls out. The Z beginning to really hit her system. The chattiness will fade, and the cattiness comes out in full-force. Dangerous. 

It’s lucky she doesn't seem inclined to suffer his presence any longer. She waves a hand at him. Slow. "Boyd will show you out."

"Later, princess," Peter says. "See you later."

| |

“What are you doing?” Stiles asks. Curious as a magpie. He reaches out to touch one of the beakers, but draws back after moment. Thinking better of the open flame underneath them. “This isn’t Z,” he continues, a little furrow in the middle of his brow.

It isn’t, no, but Zydrate will only take Peter so far. Though something will have to be done about this yellow color. “Just trying something new,” Peter says, absently. Those who don’t look towards the future won’t have one. “Tell me. What do you think, little one - is pain in the body, or the brain?”

“Everything’s in the brain,” Stiles says, not a moment’s hesitation, and Peter presses an absent-minded kiss to the top of his head. 

“So it is.” The one part of him the Argents could not destroy. The part of himself even time will not heal. Perhaps a kind of cosmic balance, in the end.

| |

Peter doesn’t know Stiles’s story. Not really. He knows Stiles once lived in the neighborhood tucked under the hills, on the other side of the graveyards. An aging neighborhood - nice, once upon a time, like so many, but as easily filled with addicts as families now. He knows Stiles’s father still looks for him, that a promise Stiles extracted from Scott long ago is the only thing preventing Scott from telling Stiles’s father where he is. That Stiles, for reasons he’s never precisely explained, hates the Argents nearly as much as Peter does. It seems less personal - more focused on GeneCo - but Peter appreciates a good judge of character.

It’s breathtakingly apparent that Stiles feels guilty for something - though whether he’s actually guilty or just blaming himself seems to be a matter of debate. That his father and Scott would take him back either way seems equally obvious. Stiles is wallowing in it, the guilt. Punishing himself even as he tries to forget. For some, Zydrate is… bliss, but a removed bliss. Blank. Unfeeling. Unknowing. The ultimate escape. 

Peter pities most Z addicts. He’s been there, he’s allowed to judge. It reaches a point where you have to wonder why they’re alive at all, if all they’re ever searching for is nothingness. Stiles is too good for nothingness. Too vibrant. Too alive, even as he tries to stamp every last spark of himself out.

| |

Some say that before you embark on a journey of revenge you must dig two graves, but Peter has always prided himself on his survival skills. Like the proverbial cockroach. 

He’s been planning his revenge for a long time. He’s spent so much time thinking - he thought, oh, he thought, he _planned_ , he hypothesized and plotted, turned it over and over in his head. It feels wonderful, now that it’s here. Worth the slow burn of it to see Kate writhing at his feet. To see the knowledge in her eyes, the realization that it was him. That he waited all this time. 

In a perfect world he might have had days to enjoy it. A slow torture, slower than what his family suffered, than what _he_ suffered - but five minutes, in the end, will do. Five minutes in the core of this ivory tower, the center of the GeneCo empire. Five minutes watching Gerard Argent’s pride and joy gasp. Sprawl out at his feet.

When only her fingers still tremble, slightly, Peter turns to Boyd and smiles. “I never did understand how she couldn't see the hate in your eyes.”

"I don't think she cared," Boyd says, and that might be equally likely. "She killed the girl I loved," and for a moment Peter is concerned Boyd might kick Kate's body, or something equally ill-advised; bruises wouldn't do at all. "Looked painful."

"Excruciating." It had taken Peter several trials, but the current results were spectacular, even by his standards. “Might I ask what you’re going to tell Gerard?"

Boyd shrugs. “OD’d on bad Z? I barely have to tell him anything.”

“Good boy,” Peter says. “If you ever need anything from me - well, you know where to find me. I’d be very appreciative. And don’t worry; I know the way out.”

| |

When he gets back Stiles is already lying on the sofa. Lounging. Long coltish legs thrown up over the armrest. Head in a pile of pillows. A tiny metal gun dangling from his fingers, and a half empty bottle of Z inside. The dogs are curled on the floor beneath him, licking at his fingers, lazy, and Peter shoos them away. Slides to the floor himself.

“Why, hello,” Peter says, and kisses the corner of Stiles’s mouth. Just above where his dimples are prone to appearing.

“Hello,” Stiles parrots, and grins. Slow. Dimples flashing in and out like stars. “Did you have a good day at the office, dear?”

Peter’s answering smile pulls at his scar tissue. Threatens to overtake his face. “Oh, the best,” he says, and this, maybe, will be his real something new.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can see I LIKE HAPPY ENDINGS
> 
> DEAL WITH IT.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> The next 'chapter' is two little bits of the remaining stories in this 'verse.


	4. [preview]

 

“And who is this adorable little thing?”

Scott rolls his eyes. “Isaac, this is Peter. Peter, this is my new partner.”

“A partner?” Peter says. Rolls the word around in his mouth. “Seems to be going around lately. Must be something in the water.”

“Getting hard out there for the rest of us. Not that you’d know.”

“Not my problem,” Peter says, and shrugs. “Now, did you get what I asked you?" Eyes boring into Scott. " _Exactly_?"

"Exactly," Scott promises. "Just the last few times, I promise."

"Hmm." He picks up the vial. Looks at it, at the perfect blue glow. “We’ll see, won’t we?” He turns back to the desk. “I promised you three?”

Scott’s eyebrows draw down. “Three-fifty,” and Isaac has a moment of near pants-pissing terror at the way Peter’s eyes flash red. He doesn’t know what the hell upgrade that is, but it’s terrifying enough in the abstract.

After a moment Peter grins, and the glow in his eyes fades. “Three-fifty. So you said.”

 

 

It’s a prison. The nicest prison money can buy - and the Argent money can buy just about anything - but a prison nonetheless. Allison doesn’t know it’s a prison. Not really. She thinks she’s sick. She thinks she’s being protected, and on some level that’s true. She is sick. Chris isn’t sociopathic enough to poison his own daughter in order to keep her inside. Just… sociopathic enough not to cure her.

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. He’s an Argent. The rules don’t precisely apply.

Sometimes, he thinks, as Allison hits another bullseye, he’s not sure if he’s concerned about unleashing the world upon Allison, or Allison upon the world.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Common Blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2682665) by [1001cranes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)




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